A war launched to demonstrate American and Israeli supremacy has instead demonstrated its limits, and the French left that refused the war is now the main beneficiary on its side of the spectrum. This essay traces that left from the Commune to Jean-Luc Mélenchon, sets it against the bipartisan American doctrine that produced Gaza and then Iran, and asks the question Lenin put in 1917: can the existing state be used, or must it be replaced?
The war that would not be won
On 28 February 2026 the United States and Israel opened a war on Iran. Seven months later they have not won it. A two-week ceasefire brokered by Pakistan took hold on 8 April, the Islamabad talks failed, Washington imposed a naval blockade, a memorandum signed in June collapsed, and fighting resumed on 8 July. By late summer American reporting itself described a war that had ground to a military stalemate, with Washington reduced to economic levers. The Strait of Hormuz is the measure of it. Roughly 20 million barrels a day, about a fifth of the world’s petroleum consumption, passed through it before the war, and the US Energy Information Administration has treated it as effectively closed since the first day. In late September Tehran offered to reopen it within seven days in exchange for a ceasefire and talks. President Trump refused. On 4 October Iran’s parliament speaker, Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf, said the strait stays shut until Iran’s seven conditions are met. Precision matters here, because the anti-war case is weakened by triumphalism. Iran has not defeated the United States in the field. Its currency has fallen to record lows under blockade, its cities have been bombed, and its leadership has changed hands in wartime. What Iran has done is deny the stronger side every stated aim: no capitulation, no regime collapse, no open strait, no nuclear settlement on American terms. For a superpower that sells its protection as a guarantee, failing to win is a form of losing. Clausewitz would recognise the result: the side with the more limited aim has imposed its terms on the question that matters most to everyone else, the price of oil.
Two American doctrines, one policy
American foreign policy presents itself as a contest between two schools. Neoconservatives hold that American force can remake hostile societies; their monument is Iraq in 2003. Liberal interventionists hold that American force can protect civilians and uphold a rules-based order; their monument is Libya in 2011. The schools differ in vocabulary and agree in practice. Both assume that American primacy is the precondition of order, that adversaries understand only pressure, and that the costs will fall elsewhere. Gaza exposed the agreement. Under a Democratic president and then a Republican one, the United States armed, financed and diplomatically shielded Israel’s campaign after October 2023. The International Court of Justice found in January 2024 that the rights claimed under the Genocide Convention were plausibly at risk. The International Criminal Court issued warrants for Israel’s prime minister and former defence minister in November 2024. Amnesty International, the International Association of Genocide Scholars and, in September 2025, a United Nations commission of inquiry each concluded that Israel was committing genocide. Israel and the United States reject that conclusion. Washington responded by sanctioning the court. The critique from the left is that this was no lapse. A liberal order that prosecutes Russian crimes in Ukraine and vetoes ceasefires in Gaza is a hierarchy, and a hierarchy is what it was built to be. The neoconservative says so openly; the liberal says it with regret. Zionism as a state project, in this reading, became the test case of who the rules are for. Iran is where the bill arrived. The same coalition that could not restrain an ally in Gaza chose escalation against the one regional power able to answer through geography. Impunity bred overreach, and overreach met a chokepoint.
The French road: Commune, Jaurès, Popular Front, Resistance
French socialism has always argued about war and bread in the same breath. The Paris Commune of 1871 was born from a lost war and a besieged, hungry city; for seventy-two days working Parisians ran their own government, with recallable delegates paid a worker’s wage, before the army of Versailles killed them in the thousands. Marx read it as the first workers’ government. Lenin would build a theory on it. Jean Jaurès united the quarrelling socialist factions into the SFIO in 1905 and spent his last years trying to stop a European war by international strike. He was shot in a Paris café on 31 July 1914. Within days his party voted the war credits. That sequence, the pacifist murdered and the party enlisted, is the founding wound of the French left. It produced the split at Tours in 1920, when the majority left to form the Communist Party and Léon Blum stayed to keep what he called the old house. The Popular Front of 1936 reunited them against fascism. Blum’s government, pushed by the largest strike wave France had seen, legislated paid holidays, the forty-hour week and collective bargaining. It also declined to arm the Spanish Republic, a failure that still divides historians. The Resistance was wider than the left: Gaullists, Catholics, communists, socialists and people of no party. The Communist Party’s record was compromised by the Nazi-Soviet pact until June 1941 and heroic after it. What the left contributed most durably was the programme of the National Council of the Resistance in 1944, which bound liberation to social security, nationalised energy and a press free from money. The lesson French socialists took was that defeating fascism and securing material life were one task.
The socialism that governed
The harder history is what socialists did with power. Guy Mollet won office in 1956 promising peace in Algeria, then sent conscripts, granted the army special powers under which torture became routine, and joined Britain and Israel in the Suez expedition. A socialist government ran a colonial war. The party took a generation to recover. François Mitterrand rebuilt it at Épinay in 1971, allied with the Communists, and won in 1981 on a programme of nationalisation, a higher minimum wage and retirement at sixty. Within two years, under pressure on the franc and the constraints of the European monetary system, he chose austerity. The 1983 turn was the moment French social democracy accepted that markets set the limits of politics. Everything since has been commentary on it: Jospin’s privatisations, the 2005 referendum in which left voters rejected a European constitution their leaders endorsed, and Hollande’s presidency, which named finance its adversary in 2012 and legislated for employers by 2016. Abroad the picture is mixed. De Gaulle took France out of NATO’s integrated command in 1966 and embargoed arms to Israel in 1967. Chirac and Villepin refused the Iraq war in 2003. French independence from Washington was largely a Gaullist achievement. Sarkozy reversed it in 2009, and the Socialists who followed him kept the reversal.
Mélenchon and the unbowed
Jean-Luc Mélenchon is a product of every stage of that history. He came to politics through a Trotskyist organisation in the 1970s, spent three decades in the Socialist Party as senator and junior minister, campaigned for the No in 2005, and left in 2008 convinced the party could not be recovered. He founded La France Insoumise in February 2016 as a movement, with action groups and a programme, L’Avenir en commun, in place of a party apparatus. The programme joins four things: redistribution and a higher minimum wage; ecological planning; a Sixth Republic written by a constituent assembly to end what he calls presidential monarchy; and a non-aligned foreign policy, including withdrawal from NATO’s integrated command. The theory behind it owes more to Chantal Mouffe and Ernesto Laclau than to Marx. Its subject is the people against the oligarchy, where the old left spoke of class against class. LFI anchored the left alliances of 2022 and 2024, and the second of these, named the New Popular Front in deliberate echo of 1936, won the most seats in the Assembly. On Gaza it used the word genocide early and paid for it in denunciation. On Iran it opposed the war from the first day. The war has repaid the position. Mélenchon declared his fourth candidacy on 3 May. Polls that gave him about 12 per cent in spring now place him near 16, ahead of the centre-right and the social democrats and in the second round in several scenarios. The same polls show Marine Le Pen beating him there by roughly 69 to 31. The left’s strongest candidate is also its weakest finalist. That is the strategic problem of French socialism in one line.
Lenin’s question
Lenin wrote The State and Revolution in the summer of 1917, in hiding, with a world war still running. Its argument rests on the Commune. The state, he held, is an instrument by which one class rules another. The working class therefore cannot take over the existing machinery of army, police and bureaucracy and run it for new ends. It must break that machinery and build its own, on the Commune’s model of elected, recallable, modestly paid delegates. His targets were the socialists of 1914, Kautsky above all, who had talked revolution and voted war credits. Read against that text, Mélenchon is on the wrong side of Lenin’s line. His is a citizens’ revolution through the ballot box. The Sixth Republic would be convened by a president elected under the Fifth. The existing state is to be refounded by its own procedures. So why are theorists who quote Lenin drifting toward him? The answer is poverty of alternatives. There is no mass revolutionary party in France. The Communist Party is a regional remnant, the Trotskyist groups poll in fractions, and the unions organise under a tenth of the workforce. A war is being fought, prices are rising, and one organisation with millions of voters says no to both. Theory follows the available instrument. The Leninist objection has not gone away. From Mélenchon’s left, the World Socialist Web Site argues that LFI steers anger into a presidential campaign and has never called a strike against the war. The precedents are Mitterrand in 1983 and Syriza in 2015: a left elected to break with the order, then broken by it. Lenin’s question is whether an elected Mélenchon would command the state or be commanded by the bond market, the Constitutional Council and the general staff. The unbowed have an answer. The Commune lasted seventy-two days. The Resistance programme, enacted through the state, lasted seventy years and still pays French pensions.
The home front is the petrol pump
The war reaches France as a price. In the first ten days diesel rose 28 centimes, about 16 per cent, and passed two euros a litre. European benchmark gas rose some 60 per cent in the first week. The European Commission’s spring forecast put Brent at an average of about 91 dollars for 2026, and the European Central Bank projected euro-area inflation near 3 per cent. France’s nuclear fleet cushions electricity. It does nothing for a lorry, a fishing boat or a commuter’s tank. Each political family answered in character. The National Rally asked for lower fuel taxes. The Socialists asked for energy cheques. LFI and the CGT asked for a price cap at 1.70 euros a litre, the pre-war level, to be paid for out of TotalEnergies’ margins. Mathilde Panot called the company a war profiteer. The government replied that there would be no cap and sent inspectors to petrol stations. The cap is the Resistance programme in miniature: the claim that in an emergency the state sets the price of necessities and capital absorbs the difference. Its weakness is also real. A cap set below the cost of replacement supply invites shortage, and no decree in Paris reopens a strait. LFI’s reply is that the cap buys time, and that only ending the war and leaving fossil dependence solve the problem. Underneath is the question the essay began with. Governments decide wars. Households pay for them. A left that connects the two has an argument no other party in France is making.
Where this argument is contested
An essay that takes a side should name the strongest objections to it.
- Genocide. Israel and the United States reject the charge and describe the Gaza campaign as self-defence after the Hamas attacks of 7 October 2023. The International Court of Justice has not ruled on the merits. Many who condemn the conduct of the war dispute that the legal threshold of intent is met.
- Zionism. The word covers a wide range, from a Jewish national home to maximalist settlement. Critics of this essay’s framing argue that treating Zionism as a single project erases that range and can shade into hostility to Jews as such, a charge LFI has faced repeatedly in France and denies.
- Who is winning. Iran has kept the strait closed, but at severe cost to its economy and people. Defenders of the war argue that Iran’s nuclear and missile programmes have been set back and that a blockade favours the side with time. The outcome is open.
- The Iranian state. Opposing a war on Iran is not the same as defending the Islamic Republic, which jails trade unionists, executes dissidents and killed protesters in 2022. Many Iranian leftists and exiles oppose both the bombing and the government, and criticise Western leftists who forget the second.
- American doctrine. Realists and many liberals argue that the alternative to American primacy is a world ordered by other powers with fewer scruples, and that Iraq and Libya were errors of execution.
- Price caps. Most economists expect a cap held below import cost to produce shortages or a large public bill.
- Mélenchon. His opponents on the left call him a divider who cannot win a second round. His opponents on the right call him an extremist. Polls currently support the first claim.
Sources
Reporting on the war, prices and polls is linked in the text and current to early October 2026. Historical sections draw on standard accounts and should be given citations before publication.
- 2026 Iran war ceasefire, Wikipedia
- Iran says Hormuz to remain closed until US meets conditions, Al Jazeera, 4 October 2026
- Iran war live updates, CBS News
- Iran offers to reopen Strait of Hormuz within 7 days, CNBC, 25 September 2026
- From the Strait to the Shopping Basket, Insurance Edge, citing the EIA and ECB
- Iran war: how exposed are European economies?, Euronews
- Prix à la pompe: la CGT et LFI appellent au blocage à 1,70 euros, LCP
- Blocage des prix, baisse des taxes, LCP
- Mélenchon confirms 2027 run, South China Morning Post
- Présidentielle 2027: vers un duel Le Pen-Mélenchon, Euronews
- Mélenchon 2027, World Socialist Web Site
Part of the Univrs research ecosystem:
- Research: metalearn.org · ardeshir.io · sepahsalar.org · univrs.io
- Creative: imagine.univrs.io
- Code: github.com/univrs · github.com/ardeshir